From the Founder | Christopher Kim, CEO + Founder of Numeral

About the article: In this interview, Christopher, founder of Numeral, discusses how the platform specializes in revenue recognition and cash reconciliation, akin to personal finance tools but tailored for businesses. He shares insights on Numeral's founding journey, early challenges, building a startup culture, and offering valuable lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs in the financial technology sector.

Numeral

Locations: San Francisco

Company Size: 11 - 50 people

Markets: Saas, Financial Services, Finance Technology

Watch the Full Interview

Amit: To start, tell me a little bit about Numeral.

Christopher: Numeral is an accounting automation platform that specifically focuses on revenue recognition and transaction-level cash reconciliation. For most listeners, most of the audience are not CPAs or accountants. Tools like Mint give you a view of your net worth in real time. It plugs into your brokerage accounts, your bank accounts, your mortgages, your loans, and it gives you a view of your net worth. We do that for businesses, except instead of a net worth view, we show the P&L and balance sheet, which is the net worth for a business.

Amit: Who are the competitors here? What are you guys doing differently than, say, NetSuite or something else?

Christopher: NetSuite is more of a general ledger. We're focused on revenue. There are multiple layers to this. At the very top layer is your general ledger, which starts with QuickBooks and then graduates to NetSuite, and eventually Oracle, Workday, SAP. Below the general ledger are subledgers. The revenue subledger for our companies is Numeral. Our expense subledger is Ramp. All a subledger is is detailed information about a specific area of accounting. The general level is all the summary level information, all the totalled-up, and then the sub ledgers are all the manual details.

Amit: What was the founding journey for you? Was this primarily, ‘I want to be a founder’ at some point, or ‘I want to start a company’ at some point, or was it ‘this idea that I have’?

Christopher: A lot of entrepreneurs have some type of itch that needs to be scratched. I made the same mistake with my first company, which was a B2C company. That was a long, drawn-out failure, but it was a great learning experience.

For my next company, I really wanted to focus on an area that I'm passionate about, where I saw a clear business opportunity, and where I have a strong skill set. The intersection of these is Numeral, where essentially accounting is just personal finance for businesses, and personal finance is my biggest passion outside of work. And then B2B software sales has been my entire career.

What's at the intersection of that? Well, it's selling to businesses and selling accounting automation software. That was the genesis for the idea for Numeral.

Amit: What was the process to come up with the idea?

Christopher: It definitely wasn't an “aha” moment. It was over a couple of years that it initially started formulating and simmered in my brain. At some point, an opportunity came about that allowed me to actually start a company and test the waters. My previous accounting Saas experience and B2B experience helped solidify the idea, and in 2022, we took the plunge.

Amit: What was the early team like? What was the early product like? Walk me through those first few months.

Christopher: It was an absolute grind. Being a founder is glorified, but you probably don't really want to be a founder with all the hard work that goes into it. There were times where you're just doing things, pulling insane hours, living out of a car… crazy stuff to just get it off the ground. There's sacrifice you have to make, especially when we started the company during a pretty bad time. But that's even better, right? If you can sell in a recession, if you can sell in a downturn, you can do it anytime.

Amit: Did you start selling to customers before the product was finished? What were you showing them to get them excited at that point?

Christopher: There are different types of founders. Some have a product background and focus on building first before selling. I come from a sales background, I focused on showing wireframes, the vision for the product, the initial UI, what it could do right now, and what it could potentially do in the future. It's about showing the gap and convincing them that we can fill it. I had a technical co-founder who helped build the initial MVP, wireframes, and designs. We sold our first product within three months.

Amit: How did you manage the uncertainty in how you'd deliver the product as described? Was it more of a market risk or technological risk?

Christopher: I'd say both. Technologically, when you say you can handle tens of millions of transaction lines a month, you don't know until you actually get it ingested into your system. We convinced customers we could handle it, and they believed us and gave us the opportunity, which we're grateful for. Market risk-wise, there were a lot of unknowns, things you don't know you don't know, and how it's going to go.

Amit: What about your team now? How did it grow over the years from you and your co-founder?

Christopher: Our entire company size now is 12 people. Initially, all our hires were engineers because of the data-intensive nature of our platform. We didn't hire our first non-engineer until about 14 months in, which was a marketing hire.

Amit: How did you find those early engineers and convince them to join, given the risk?

Christopher: One of my mentors told me that to recruit someone to believe in your vision, you need to first believe in it yourself. You need some initial signals that tell you there's something here. For us, it was customers paying upfront and signing significant contracts. The rest takes care of itself when you share that conviction with prospective candidates.

It's almost reverse psychology—telling them candidly what you're optimizing for. If it's money, maybe it's not the right fit. But if you're looking for experience in a super early-stage startup and eventually want to start your own company, then come here. I can't compete with Amazon or Google on salary, but I can compete on ownership, experience, equity, and impact.

Amit: How did you approach interviewing and hiring in those early days when you were bringing on the core of your company?

Christopher: You’re not going to like this answer… because when we were initially starting out, because we sold very quickly and because our software wasn't fully built out, it was just like, "Hey, this is the vision. This is what we're going to build. Let's sell it and then let's build it in real time." We did a bad job of vetting for initial engineers. We essentially hired folks we shouldn't have hired, and we did this too because we wanted to build this platform as soon as possible, right, as quickly as possible.

We didn't really vet for culture. We didn't really vet for, "Hey, do we think this person will last at least 2 years with us?" So our first four out of the first five engineers we hired, eventually we parted ways with them, and that was a really good lesson that I've learned that hopefully your listeners don't learn that way. Even if you have hard deadlines from customers, even if you're very, very pressed from an engineering technical perspective to build something quickly, don't hire folks you don't see having an actual future potential there.

Amit: You can go both ways. You can go too slowly too, right? And a lot of companies have this failure where they're looking for a perfect unicorn and they wait really, really long. And personally, at least in my career, I've found that you don't want to be super fast and throw people in, but also you need to be able to take chances on people. How have you adapted your process going from there to check for these things?

Christopher: Now we're in a different stage. At this point, we raised a total of 4 million dollars in funding, and we have customers in which we've communicated the timelines. We're not going to over promise something ridiculous that we may have done early on. Also it helps to work with recruiters, the headhunters you trust that forward you folks in their network. For example, our most recent engineering leader we hired was from a friend of mine in network who's a headhunter.

Amit: What about your company do you want to be thoughtful about at this stage?

Christopher: The biggest thing that's going through my head these days right now is how I make my technology more self-serve. Right now, our customers rely on us during implementations because we handle very sensitive information and important processes that if they get wrong, they can't fundraise or they fail audits. As companies mature,if you're selling more up-market, it's fine where you're a bit of a professional services element, kind of a services SaaS business.But that's a work in progress because essentially what we're doing is building software that's as scalable as a database but as flexible as a spreadsheet.

Amit: How do you hold your team accountable to something like that, or inspire that in your team, especially as a kind of business-focused founder with mostly engineers in your early teams?

Christopher: One way that we do it here at Numeral is we have shared Slack channels of all our customers. At the early onset of the company, we had an SLA of 30 seconds. If somebody pinged us, it symbolized the speed in which we operate.

It didn't matter if it was just saying, "Hey, I got your question. I'll address it," or "Hey, I got your question. We're looking into it right now. We'll get back to you by the end of day today." You can imagine how that would look positively to a customer as well as internally to the team.

Amit: How did you maintain the ability to be on top of Slack that much, to be able to do that? Were you sending text notifications to yourself? Did you have notifications turned on?

Christopher: No, I never have notifications turned off, which is not healthy, but hey, starting a startup is not healthy.

When you are an early-stage startup, there are certain disadvantages you have and advantages you have. Disadvantages are “I don't have the budget like an Oracle”. “I don't have the brand awareness like an Oracle”. The advantages we have as a startup is when you ask me to do something, I will do it immediately, and I'll make sure you feel like the most special person in the world. That responsiveness is a product feature. You won't get that level of service and speed at a big incumbent somewhere else. That's how we like to think about it at the early stage. The level of service, the speed, the responsiveness, that is a part of the product feature.

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